SWIFT Denies It’s Joining Ripple’s Blockchain Network

Speculation that RippleNet and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) were planning to integrate may have caused the market cap of ripple (XRP) to briefly overtake that of ethereum to take the second position in the overall crypto market.

SWIFT Says it isn’t Joining RippleNet

This was based on the belief that with the integration, RippleNet — an enterprise blockchain which does not use XRP — would serve as a gateway to convincing SWIFT members to adopt XRP-integrated Ripple products like xRapid in the future.

Fueling the rumor was the fact that SWIFT had announced that beginning in November its new standard in cross-border money transfers, SWIFT global payments innovation (GPI), would be upgraded with the GPI tracker being extended to all payment messages for 11,000 banks on the network across 200 countries. With this upgrade, the rumor went, about 4,000 banks would now get access to Ripple products.

However, these rumors have been dismissed by SWIFT, according to Finance Magnates. Through its public relations firm, the bank-owned payments network that was founded more than four decades ago denied that the upgrade had anything to do with RippleNet:

“I’m not sure where those rumours are coming from but the upcoming standards release … is entirely unrelated to RippleNet.”

Possibly also contributing to the speculation are some developments which have taken place in the last couple of years. In April of last year, for instance, Ripple hired a former SWIFT executive who was responsible for selling its GPI offering, Marjan Delatinne, as its sales director for Europe.

Had the speculation been true, such a partnership could potentially have seen SWIFT greatly benefit from the RippleNet, especially with regards to transaction speeds. While RippleNet claims it can route “payments efficiently and leverage instant settlement to transact in seconds,” SWIFT says that even with the upgrade, only 50% of the SWIFT GPI payments are credited in under half an hour — and SWIFT thinks that this is worth bragging about.

Prior to the brief “flippening” earlier this week, the market capitalization of XRP had overtaken ethereum’s a couple of times this year, as CCN had previously reported.